What is it with Oxfam?

Len Shackleton has a worthwhile CAPX piece on the well-known decline of Oxfam.


Oxfam is up to its old anti-capitalist tricks again…


What is it with Oxfam?

This huge international charity, founded in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief to help the starving citizens of Nazi-occupied Greece, has over the decades done excellent work in the developing world, or what we must now call the Global South. But in recent years it seems to have lost its way.

There was the scandalous behaviour of its operatives in Haiti and Chad , and later in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the inadequate way in which Oxfam reacted to reports of gross sexual misconduct, intimidation and bullying. This meant that the organisation has twice been temporarily banned from bidding for UK government aid funds , which constitute a significant chunk of its income.

There have been accusations that Oxfam has been consistently anti-Israel if not outright anti-Semitic, and in 2015 its Belgian affiliate was accused of indirectly funding Palestinian terrorism.


Well worth reading as yet another example of a once respected organisation which has declined, not into irrelevance, but into useful idiot status. The BBC is another example.


In March this year, the charity waded into the culture wars by publishing a 92-page document urging its staff to change words such as mother and father to the more inclusive ‘parent’, and expectant mothers ‘people who become pregnant’. A few weeks later, this standard-issue wokery was followed up by an extraordinary video post celebrating Pride Month, but appearing to depict JK Rowling as a hateful ‘Terf’.

Leaving all this stuff aside, a constant in Oxfam’s public personality for several years has been its taste for full-blooded attacks on the capitalist system, asserting that it’s a rip-off that immiserates the poor – a claim naturally accompanied by demands for massive political intervention and confiscatory levels of taxation.

And nothing will be done.